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Participatory Science

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“Don’t Overlook the Common”: How Charlie and Sue Staines Found Over 1,000 Beetle Species at SERC

Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

by Mona Patterson

Charlie and Sue Staines pose for a camera in a grassy field, surrounded by tall reeds. Sue drapes her right arm over Charlie's shoulder, while holding a small bug-catching net in her left hand.
Charlie Staines (right) and his wife, Sue Staines, have documented over 1,000 beetle species at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. (Photo: Cheryl Harner)

Beetles, with their astonishing diversity and ecological prowess, quietly underpin the health of ecosystems around the globe. But do we even know what beetles roam our backyards? As of July 2024, the bug-catching duo Charlie and Sue Staines have identified over 1,000 beetle species on the campus of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), unveiling a dazzling array of nature’s tiny marvels.

There are over 25,000 beetle species in North America alone. This makes their conservation critical to the survival of countless organisms, including our own. As prominent decomposers, they aid in the breakdown of forest matter and recycling of nutrient-rich material back into the ecosystem. As predators, they reduce populations of problem insects, like aphids and caterpillars. By studying beetles at SERC, we can better understand their populations, their roles in ecosystems and the overall health of the environments they inhabit.

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Chesapeake Water Watch: A New Participatory Science Project at SERC

Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

by Shelby Brown

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the City College of New York (CCNY) have joined forces to launch a new participatory science project in the Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake Water Watch is a collaborative effort aimed at filling in the gaps of traditional water monitoring techniques by using remote sensing and community involvement.

We see a woman with brown hair and a blue and white baseball hat kneeling down on a pier next to the water. She's pointing her phone up to the sky as she uses the HydroColor app to collect water clarity data for Chesapeake Water Watch. In front of her, also on the wooden pier, is a black clipboard with a gray piece of paper that she uses to calibrate the app. 
Volunteer Beth Paquette uses the free smartphone app, HydroColor, to collect turbidity (water clarity) data for the Chesapeake Water Watch project. Credit: Beth Paquette. 
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Biodiversity Makes Reefs Tick—But It Needs Big Players

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022

by Kristen Goodhue

Underwater photo of silver fish swimming over a reef, with orange, pink, brown and white coral.
A school of yellowtail kingfish (Seriola lalandi) at Lord Howe Island in Australia. The presence of large fish like yellowtails can help keep ecosystems healthy and productive, a new study found. (Credit: Rick Stuart Smith, Reef Life Survey)

Three thousand reefs. (Technically 3,040 reefs, for those who like precision.) That’s how many underwater sites scientists and volunteers poured over in the latest effort to uncover how much biodiversity matters for reef health.

The answer: Quite a lot.

Scientists have known for years that diverse fish communities help ocean ecosystems flourish, even when facing rising temperatures and climate change. But the latest study, published in Nature Communications, reveals it’s about more than the numbers. Which species call a reef home can matter just as much as how many there are. And that holds especially true when it comes to large predator fish.

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How Scientists Responded to Cannibalism, and the Surprising Comeback of California’s Most Unwanted Crab

Friday, July 9th, 2021

by Marissa Sandoval

Young woman on dock holds up a green crab

Julie Gonzalez, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, holds up an invasive European green crab. (Credit: SERC)

In an artificially created estuary near San Francisco Bay, called Seadrift Lagoon, a very real problem arose when European green crabs (Carcinus maenas) arrived in the 1990s. After taking up residency, the invasive species population grew immensely as the crabs feasted on Dungeness crabs, clams, and oysters—a grim problem for the native animals and migratory shorebirds that rely on them.

The stark situation demanded major intervention. In 2009, researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)’s Marine Invasions Lab, the University of California, Davis, and Portland State University partnered to eradicate the local European crab population through intensive trapping.

But their efforts accidentally led to even more green crabs. Now, over a decade later, the teams who addressed the problem head-on have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on what they learned from a conservation effort gone awry. Led by Ted Grosholz of the University of California, Davis, the new study advocates for major caution when working with invasive species whose life history is similar to European green crabs. Click to continue »

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How the “Blue Methane” Team Used COVID Restrictions To Get More Data Than Ever

Thursday, April 15th, 2021

by Kristen Minogue

Three scientists in masks taking measurements in a wetland

Erika Koontz (right) pauses for a selfie with Shelby Cross (left) and Kyle Derby (center) while doing methane sampling in Maryland’s Jug Bay, one of the few sites she could visit in-person during the pandemic. (Credit: Erika Koontz)

This article is part of a series of posts highlighting research the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center is continuing to do amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and adaptations its staff have been making in a more socially distant world.

Like many scientists, Erika Koontz was hired for a specific project. She had just begun a job as a technician with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Biogeochemistry Lab. Her new supervisor, James Holmquist, had an ambitious goal in mind: Uncover how wetlands across the U.S. store—or emit—the powerful greenhouse gas methane. They called it the Blue Methane project.

“It’s a dataset that’s really never been attempted before, to be housed under one single project,” Koontz said. During field season, Koontz would visit wetlands on the East, West and Gulf Coasts, sampling methane in their porewater and measuring the flux of methane into and out of their soils.

Koontz started her job in March 2020. Enough said on that subject.

The next six months were some of the busiest of her life.

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Seagrass Restoration Brings New Life To Virginia’s Once-Forsaken Bays

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

by Kristen Minogue

Two decades ago, it was almost impossible to find eelgrass in Virginia’s South Bay—or many of the other small bays behind the barrier islands along the state’s eastern shore. After a barrage of disease followed by a powerful hurricane wiped them out by 1933, many thought the eelgrasses would never return. With the eelgrass went the brant goose, a popular waterfowl for sport hunting, and a lucrative bay scallop industry that had brought in millions of dollars per year.

“Because the bay scallop relies on the eelgrass as it’s growing up, it just completely disappeared and never came back,” said Jonathan Lefcheck, a marine biologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

Today, a 20-year restoration has transformed South Bay and its neighboring bays into an oasis. But for the scientists leading the effort, restoring the eelgrass wasn’t enough. They wanted to find out if all the benefits eelgrasses provide would return as well. A new Science Advances report finally gave them their answer.
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Plastic Cleanup Expedition Helps Research Stay Afloat During Pandemic

Friday, September 4th, 2020

by Isabella Eclipse

Yellow buoy floating in water, with bottom covered in barnacles and a diver taking photos behind it.

Plastic buoy in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, colonized by gooseneck barnacles and crabs. (Credit: Justin Hofman/Greenpeace)

This article is part of a series of posts highlighting research the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center is continuing to do amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and adaptations its staff have been making in a more socially distant world.

In nature, adaptation is key to survival. This year more than ever, being adaptable and resilient has also been essential to working as a scientist. Faced with a pandemic, researchers around the world have had to find creative ways to continue their work.

SERC postdoc Linsey Haram is part of the FloatEco Project, a research collaboration that studies artificial ecosystems made of floating ocean plastic. By hitchhiking on pieces of plastic, coastal organisms can drift into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and survive in the middle of the ocean.

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The Hunt for Historic Graves

Friday, August 28th, 2020

by Kristen Minogue

Author’s Note: SERC is keenly interested in finding more descendants of the Sellmans, Contees, enslaved Black families, tenant farmers and others who lived and worked on what is now the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. If you wish to be part of documenting our shared history, please send information to Kristen Minogue at minoguek@si.edu.

Split gray tombstone amid forest understory, speckled with shadows of the forest canopy

The tombstone of Thomas Francis from 1685, now split in two. (Credit: Christine Dunham)

On March 19, 1685, a major named Thomas Francis took his wife on a boating trip to visit their neighbors across the Rhode River, at a plantation called Tulip Hill in southern Maryland. He never returned. Francis drowned in a boating accident on the way back, at the young age of 42.

His tombstone bore a poetic inscription urging his family not to mourn, but to hope for a reunion after death. One snippet read: “For tho grim death thought fitt to part us here/Rejoyce & think that wee shall once appeare/At that great day when all shall Summond be.”

Fast forward to the 1850s. The field where Thomas Francis lies buried now sits near the intersection of two plantations belonging to the Contee and Sellman families. Both families rely heavily on enslaved Black families to grow wheat, corn and tobacco. Like many wealthy plantation owners, the Sellmans bury their dead in a family cemetery near the house.

Dozens of people lived, toiled and died on the land that today forms the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). But much remains unknown about their burials. SERC staff knew that Thomas Francis’ tombstone—reportedly the oldest in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County—was on SERC property, but at least a decade had passed since anyone had seen it. Three gravestones once inside the Sellman family cemetery now sit in the nearby All Hallows Church. While small footstones and brick pavers still mark the original graves, SERC staff didn’t know how many other Sellmans lay under the site. There are rumors, but no definitive records, of where the enslaved people had their final resting place.

Today, a team of archaeologists, historians, citizen scientists and cadaver dogs is on the brink of solving the mystery.
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Carbon Sensors in the Time of Coronavirus

Friday, August 21st, 2020

by Isabella Eclipse

Young man in mask on a green lawn next to solar panel

Marc Rosenfield sets up a carbon cycling sensor outside the U.S. Capitol Building. (Credit: Megan Wilkerson)

This is the second in a series of posts highlighting research the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center is continuing to do amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and adaptations its staff have been making in a more socially distant world.

When the pandemic hit, many scientists’ field sites closed down, bringing countless research projects to a screeching halt. Marc Rosenfield, a graduate student at George Washington University, found himself in this exact situation when the Virginia Coast Reserve shut its doors. An ecosystem ecologist, Rosenfield was studying the exchange of carbon between the land and the atmosphere. He’d planned to deploy carbon sensors to understand how carbon exchange differs when moving from marshes to surrounding forests.

Instead of giving up, Rosenfield switched gears and transformed his research into a citizen science project. He, along with his dedicated undergraduate assistant Leona Neftaliem, reached out to colleagues in Washington, D.C., to see if anyone would allow the setup of carbon sensors in their backyards. To his surprise, an overwhelming number said yes. Soon, strangers were asking him to set up sensors on their properties. Today, Rosenfield has 30 sensors in locations across D.C., from private backyards to the U.S. Botanic Garden. There’s even one at the famous 9:30 nightclub.

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Volunteer Spotlight: Student Activist Kallan Benson on Standing Up for Climate Change

Tuesday, April 14th, 2020

by Kristen Minogue

Teenage girl in blue tie-dye shirt sitting on a bench holding a golden retriever. Posters behind her read "Stop playing with our future" and "Fridays for Future" in rainbow marker.

Kallan Benson with her family’s golden retriever, Osage. The dog is their unofficial “Climate Anxiety Therapy.” (Credit: Carl Benson)

It would be tempting say Kallan Benson isn’t your typical teenage student. Homeschooled since preschool age, she has plenty of memories of doing homeschool programs at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center with her younger brother, Reese.

“We made toothpaste one time,” she recalled. “Reese’s group, him and two of our other friends, their strategy was just put everything in….Every flavor, they just put it all in. No one wanted to taste it.”

But as an organizer for the grassroots climate group Fridays For Future, Kallan is one of thousands. Possibly even tens of thousands. The tidal wave of students striking to demand climate action is gaining momentum, and Benson is among those leading the charge. Click to continue »

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